Is that the current going rate for aiding and abetting theft by false pretenses?

How about they reimburse the employers who paid out wages to those workers who fraudulently claimed to be sick? And if any were government workers (many, most?), then criminal prosecutions for defrauding the government.

So in my younger days I used to drink and drive a lot (never got caught or caused in accident). If I had done that in Madison and got stopped, all I would have had to say to the police is "I am a liberal Democrat on my home from an anti-Republican protest" and I would have been let go. Gotta love a bananna republic.

In one sense this is a wrist slap, however they will be forced to list the sanction every time they apply for a job, privileges at a hospital, apply for participation in an insurance program as a participating provider, apply for a medical license in another state, apply for malpractice insurance, etc.

AA, I hear you know a thing or two about law. Can a trial lawyer bring this up in a malpractice lawsuit, or do all subjects have to be related directly to the given case?

Just wondering if a suing lawyer could say "you have be shown in the past to diagnos patients without a proper and full examination. And I will show that you continue to do that which caused you to miss the xxxx in my client, which caused her death/disability."

There is whole new career open to them in writing disability letters for slackers and frauds. Just one more blow to professional ethics. Why should teachers be the only ones to benefit from poor ethics ?

I'll say it again....the problem with Madison is the lack of diversity. A left wing medical person sees nothing wrong with going out to an incredbly busy street and advertising fake medical documents. In a more...and I mean this with a little respect...more cosmopolitian/larger city, one with some diversity, a little red bell would go off alerting said person that this may not be a good idea.

Those doctors, especially the young ones, will find the notoriety and encouraging fines enticing, marking the first few steps, one little lie after another, dishonesty for politics and then for other reasons, all justified, one after another, ultimately corrupted and co-opted by other forces, some malign.

Might be a good time to read Nazi Doctors by Jay Lifton.

That would require insight and an ethical framework, though, so, probably a waste of time.

I have a dislocated vertebra from hanging my head at what has happened and is happening to our profession. I have a Dartmouth degree in medical outcomes research and I know how these people think. Cash medicine will be my choice once the guys I know have all retired. Not much time left.

I have nothing against female docs and know a couple good ones but they are more likely to work for HMOs and HMO docs are very dependent on their bonuses.

My understanding has been that for years malpractice insurance in Wisconsin was less than malpractice insurance in Illinois because Wisconsin doctors did a better job of policing each other. Calling out and punishing a bad doctor means the ones who are left are better doctors. However, if the doctors of Wisconsin want to play this game, there are consequences. I can see where a lawyer would want to use such a past as a reason to explain to a jury why said doctor is not so honest in their work.

Just think how hard it is to get into medical school, and these asses got in. While we complain about the healthcare reform, with this sort of shit going on, it is hard to be sympathetic to doctors. The system of admissions is rigged to admit those related to doctors into medical school ahead of others, to let the 1%ers in before others based on merit. Then doctors get subsidized educations. Sure, the have huge loans, but they seem to charge huge fees. Now they pull this crap. Doctors then are part of the healthcare problem. Is this painting with a broad brush? Sure. Will we hear outrage from any other doctor that this "punishment" was insignificant? No.

For what it's worth, I think every one of these doctors should be fired, and their licenses suspended for one year. The residents should be expelled. The teachers should be removed from teaching ever again.

The fine is a goddamned joke and pisses me off. But the fact remains that people like that have been running medicine for decades.

Look, Pogo: This means that according to the docs in WI appointed to oversee and speak for all docs in WI, lying through your teeth in a medical excuse letter is an offense whose seriousness is measured in a fraction of the cost of a business-class airplane ticket to Las Vegas.

Is that what you want for your profession?

Is there nothing that you think the "average WI physician" can do about it?

This is ironic, in that doctors have, since the inception of the "labor" movement, been highly resistant to unionizing, for the all-too-obvious reason that making physicians join unions effectively de-professionalizes them and makes them a common labor commodity, paid in wages rather than in salary or fee for service.

Younger doctors, raised in an America where credentials matter more than professional standards (there is a distinction), may be o.k. with this.

"The board action today holds these physicians accountable for their very public actions," said a statement from Sujatha Kailas, a physician and chairman of the Medical Examining Board.

No, it didn't.

The Med-Ex board has no clothes, however much, for one example, Sujatha Kaila might prefer, even choose, otherwise. This decision contributes to no "wonderful fabric" [quite the contrary], and it's Kaila's--and the entire Med-Ex board's--job to understand that and why. Or at least it was. Apparently, it's now understood differently.

The main effect of the bogus doctor notes should have been that school districts no longer accept a doctor's note as an excuse for a teacher missing school. Teachers should be required to provide something a bit more substantial, since a doctor's note is now no more believable than a student's note signed "Horshak's mom".

Actually, Pogo, I'm assuming you're from WI, and that may be unwarranted. Let me put it this way:

I'm a Texas lawyer. When North Carolina prosecutor Nifong went insane, I wrote about it (on my own and many other blogs) to try to educate the public as to the nature of this cancer on my profession, even though it was from a state in which I was not licensed. I discussed it with colleagues; I took a stand and made it public. His actions made me hang my head just out of discomfort that that lawless asshole, that abuser of a sacred public trust, was in the same profession as me.

If your attitude about this is, "Oh well, far away and some other jurisdiction, doesn't affect me or my practice of my profession where I live," then color me unimpressed.

That's shallow. What it is, is that they are in it for their own elites, their own little bits of the rug, and they'll bite anything and anyone who gets in the way of maintaining that rug (they'd like to grow it, yes; but in this day and age, the main thing is to maintain their bit of the rug). This is how loops and echoes operate: They tend to replicate incessantly and bounce back over and over.

Medicine is dying, soon to be replaced by boards and protocols and NPs and PAs and nurses.

See: Medicare. Right, Pogo?

Various Mayo Clinics (is it all of them, yet?), for example, in several states have stopped accepting certain Medicare patients (or, at least, have stopped providing certain types of treatments at Medicare-reimbursement levels).

I think Mayo (and its doctors) for example, could lead the way by stating that it is a strictly private-pay endeavor. Or at least a recipient of reimbursements only from personal payers or private insurers. This should be stated in very strong terms (henceforth, many years in advance, because continuity of care is profoundly important, which every patient knows and no doctor of true Mayo caliber can or ought challenge) such that people who might be making the transition from private/personal insurance to Medicare understand and accept the ground rules sufficient years in advance. Both sides should state and sign onto the ground rules, including lead times. Both should then live by those rules and lead-times (otherwise known as principles, applied without corruption on the margins). No fair cheating for personal advantage.

Choose the parameters, state them, and then live by them--and no cheating. Everyone.

Dan, much earlier in this thread, wondered if doctors at UW pay for malpractice insurance. They don't. The Stae of Wisconsin covers them. And, no lawyer in Wisconsin will bother suing a UW doctor for malpractice because there is a limit of 25K on awards against covered State employees. That's the law. Neat, isn't it.

An appropriate sentence, for the full years that Obamacare is capping reimbursement rates for services rendered to Medicaid, and Medicare patients is the policy, these doctors are first in service and last to receive payment.

As an RN of 20 years I knew this would be the ultimate outcome since the get go. I would be delighted to detail all the ugly things I see routinely from incompetent residents, to attending docs who could give a shit about what is actually going on with their patients, particularly in the middle of the night at the hospital. However to do so would risk someone tracking done who I actually am and ensuring I no longer had a job, or the ability to get another. And no that is not simply paranoia speaking. As far as medicine being taken over by the left wing, that has been the case for about a hundred years, the mental health community as well as the top tier of educators in both medicine and nursing have been of that political ideology for at least those 100 years. The vast majority back then were also supporters of eugenics, which was not a conservative baby, it was a progressive baby. One of those early supporters was the head of the dept. of medicine at U of M, as well as other "top" schools.

It's taken more than just since the late 60s to us where we are today folks, this has been going on since the late 1800s, at least in our institutions.

Without yanking it out by the roots, don't expect anything different, in medicine or otherwise.

AS a physician who practices in neighboring Minnesota, I can report that getting a reprimand from the Board of Medical Practice is a Big Deal, no matter what the offense. Hasn't ever happened to me, but I know several docs that have landed therer. The local paper loves to print the story and every time one applies for re-certification or re-credentialing or just a license renewal there is a requirement to report the discipline. Ouch! It may or may not affect things like malpractice insurance but I can report I'm very glad it has never happened to me.

Since the state medical association will not firmly dicipline atttempted medical fraud, how about any time any of those doctors sign off on anything the state pays for, it trigggers an automatic fraud investigation.Both the fraudsters and the state medical board that decriminalises medical fraud perpetrated by a doctor.